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jacques

Member

From: The Woods, Maine

Registered: 2007-08-20

Posts: 12

External USB HD not working with ntfs-3g (solved)

I have a 250g WD External HD that I had formatted with ntfs.  I've been trying to mount it with ntfs-3g, but when I try to mount -a, I get the error:

Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.
Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?

My fstab currently looks like:

/dev/sdb1  /mnt/files ntfs-3g defaults 0 1

When I fdisk -l, the drive is shown as:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       30401   244196001    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

So far, the only thing I can think of is that the drive is somehow not NTFS, but whatever w95 fat32 is.

Has anyone else had experiences and been able to fix it?

Any help is much appreciated!  Thanks,
Jacques

Last edited by jacques (2007-09-22 16:14:49)

gothmog.todi

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2007-07-18

Posts: 120

Re: External USB HD not working with ntfs-3g (solved)

did you try to mount it as vfat?

leo2501

Member

From: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Registered: 2007-07-07

Posts: 658

Re: External USB HD not working with ntfs-3g (solved)

i use to have an external usb 300gb disk (actually a sata drive inside a usb case) and when i boot (with nothing in fstab) i enter in console as root:

$ ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/300gb

where sdb1 is my device, and it rocks!... now i formated that drive to ext3 and the speed increase i think it doubles

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Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

SleepingGiant08

Member

From: Ellicott City, MD USA

Registered: 2007-01-10

Posts: 124

Re: External USB HD not working with ntfs-3g (solved)

did you try to mount it as vfat?

Yea W95 FAT32, or fat32 should mount as vfat not NTFS/ntfs-3g

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Registered Linux User #439761

jacques

Member

From: The Woods, Maine

Registered: 2007-08-20

Posts: 12

Re: External USB HD not working with ntfs-3g (solved)

Thanks everyone